Donald Clark Plan B

What is Plan B? Not Plan A!

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Leadership BS - why the leadership industry is a Ponzi scheme

Leadership BS is
as good a management book as you’ll ever read. It eschews the usual platitudes
for a view of the world as messy and complex. It deals in realism, not
idealism. Professor Pfeffer, of Stanford Business School, confirmed much of
what I already thought about leadership and management… and much more, but it’s
his candour and realism that impresses. As he exposes the nostrums, stories,
fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism,
myth-making feel-good nonsense that passes for Leadership training, he also
offers a solution – realism. He replaces normative wishes with evidence and the
realities of the workplace. That’s pretty refreshing.

The Leadership
industry has failed

Unequivocally, he claims that the Leadership industry has
not only empirically failed, with study after study of workplace discontent,
but also that it contributes to that failure. As the cult of leadership has
risen, its perceived effectiveness has fallen. Bullying, stress, discontent are
the norm. A huge amount of evidence is presented to show failure after failure
in so called ‘leadership’. What he uncovers is an almost wilful avoidance of
evidence, measurement and data. He questions the very construct of leadership,
suggesting that it was invented as a simplification to deliberately obfuscate
the real complexity of the workplace. So despite the $20 billion spend, the
results are depressingly disappointing.

What happened?

Pfeffer’s challenge is to recognise reality and accept that
the workplace and people are much more complex than the feel-good training
courses suggest. In reality, leaders’ behaviours are often at odds with those
of the organisation. Their interests in terms of rewards, promotion and
progress are often at odds with those they manage and even the organisations
they lead.

His arguments against ‘Leadership training’ are pretty
damning. Here’s just ten, he has dozens more:

1.Most who offer leadership advice have never led
anything

2.If they have, they were notoriously unsuccessful

3.Too many compensation consultants linked to
leadership industry

4.Woeful lack of actual expertise & knowledge

5.Peddle inspiration not realities of management

6.Rely largely on storytelling and anecdote

7.Evaluation rarely beyond hours of training
delivered etc.

8.Stuck in primitive ‘happy-sheet’ evaluation

9.Over-reliant on self-evaluation

10.Totally
unaccountable

In the content he finds no-end of stories and anecdotes (as
opposed to evidence) that are exaggerated, even fabricated. These myths are
counter-productive as they produce cynicism in employees. The rhetoric is not
matched by actual action and behaviour. Worse, those who don’t conform to the
out-dated leadership model don’t get promoted and may even get fired. Others,
such as women and certain cultural minorities, that value modesty and
collaboration, also suffer. These are his general criticisms but the strength
of the book comes in the precise qualities he sees as being quite wrong-headed.

Modesty

Given that the book was published in 2015, he was prescient
in identifying Trump as a typical product of the charismatic leader cult. He
plays the leadership game and is winning. Pfeffer punctures the idea that
‘modesty’ is an admired and effective leadership trait. He draws on Maccoby’s
book The Productive Narcissist, and
his own evidence, to show that modesty, far from being a virtue, stops managers
from thinking for themselves and being resilient in the face of adversity. It
is energy, confidence and dominance that gets them where they are, not modesty.
The Leadership industry may be holding back women and other potential managers
by promoting false promises, such as modesty. He also accuses HR and talent
management companies of being dishonest here in training for these qualities
then recruiting the very opposite.

Authenticity

It may surprise many that anyone would question ‘authenticity’
as a quality for leadership – but he does. He flips this to show that good
managers need to do what people need them to do, not what they as managers
simply want to do, not pander to their own views of themselves. Flight
attendants, shop assistants, sales people and many others wouldn’t last a day
by being totally ‘authentic’, neither do managers and leaders. He also mentions
the ‘delicious irony’ of leadership trainers who ‘train’ people to be
‘authentic’, as if it is a trait that can be acquired in a classroom. Being
authentic, is for Pfeffer, pretty much the opposite of what leaders need to be.

Trust

Much as trust would seem to be desirable in leadership, it
may not be that simple. Bernie Madoff inspired ‘trust’. Indeed, many L&D
Ponzi schemes work on ‘trust’ – NLP, Myers-Briggs. Trust, like faith can lead
one into real trouble. It may be desirable not to trust lawyers, competitors,
politicking managers. True objectivity and realism may only be the result of not
trusting everyone to tell the truth within an organisation, as you will be
misled, even duped. You need to be on the mark, alert to deception, moves, protecting
the organisation and, truth be told, that means distrusting some people.

Examples

Rich in real examples of leaders who were less than ideal,
he shows how leadership training misses the mark most of the time – especially
with the titans of tech; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison. Political,
sports and other leaders get a similar treatment. Most of the positive examples
turn out to have serious flaws. So, when we look at what are called successful
leaders, they turn out to be very different from what the leadership industry
tells us. His recommendation is to get serious on the research, mainly what is effective, then hold so-called 'leaders' to account - not with happy-sheet nostrums but real accountability. This is an important point. It's not ghat he promotes immodesty, being inauthentic and telling lies, only to recognise that leaders and emplyees are people and that human nature always wins out. The remedy is to identify what you need from proposed leaders and then to make sure that they perform to those measures. This is where HR and remuneration committees fail. They pretend to be doing this when what they actualy do is pander to an utdated cult of leadership.

Ponzi scheme

I have a similar but stronger position than Pfeffer on this,
as I think the whole ‘Leadership’ narrative and training is misleading, harmful
and Pozies out traditional management training as ‘Leadership’ courses. There
is a lack of definition, theory and practice around the concept and it has
become a Ponzi scheme, distracting from the real needs in workplace learning.

Conclusion

Near the end of the book he quotes the movie A Few Good Men,
“You want the truth?... You can’t handle
the truth!” Only read this book if you are willing to open your mind to the
possibility that most of what you’ve heard about Leadership training is BS. It’s a hard pill to swallow for the L&D
community – but the more we delay the cure, the bigger the epidemic of BS will
become. It has already infected our schools, our politics. Let's ban the word 'leadership'. It's BS.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

7 ways to Square the African Circle (E-learning Africa)

Egypt has always been fond of grand gestures, from the
Pyramids to the Aswan Dam, so it was fitting that we heard from Ismail
Serageldin about the wonders of the modern Library at Alexandria (he’s the
boss) – but I wonder. He talked about the Rhind Papyrus, where the Egyptians
showed how to square the circle. But what circles is this institution squaring?
It seemed to be more of a relic of the past, with its 15 Institutes, 19 Museums
and 7 Libraries. It seemed to look more to the past than the future. He did,
however, have one good line; that, in Africa, Rhetoric, Plans, Visions and Announcements are
not equal to ACTION.

1. Squaring the scale
circle

On that note I was far more interested in Toby Shapshak, who
I spoke to later. He was looking to Africa’s future and saw everywhere, signs
of innovation that need to be encouraged. He highlighted mobile banking, where
even a custom’s official had asked him for a bribe via the mobile banking app M-Pesa.
Interesting tale, as that is the first circle that has to be squared - scale. You
have the technology, what Africa now needs is a rapid ramp up, not of buildings
and institutions but scalable internet infrastructure. It needs connectivity,
not concrete.

2. Squaring the
education circle

Shapshak was critical of the rigid formal education he sees
across Africa, archaic content, old textbooks, rote learning and poor teaching.
The Library of Alexandria seemed a long way off from the innovation of Elon
Musk, an African who really is changing the world. He was an outsider from
Pretoria, not someone from within the formal education system. In fact he was
mercilessly bullied at school and eventually dropped out of his post-graduate
degree after 2 days. He was self-driven, not driven by institutional goals. And
boy, what a success – SpaceX, Tesla, SloarCity, OpenAI. Throughout the
conference I heard abstract presentations from academia, mistaking rhetoric for
action, papers for innovation, research for action. The innovation in Africa
will not come from African Universities. It will come from their
entrepreneurial culture. Sure you need the bedrock of good education and
educational institutions but don’t buy into the myth that this is the true path
for future prosperity.

Indeed the almost obsessive focus on University education may
even exacerbate inequalities, as the elite get the opportunity while the vast
majority do not. At all of these conferences the academic contingent has a
disproportionate voice, as they are often the only group that are funded to
attend. Africa’s greatest need is for vocational
not academic education. It cannot afford to make the same mistake as the rest
of us and ignore vocational learning. Continuing to build Universities, without
an adequate skills base, is not sustainable, as the Universities, in my view,
will not be the place from which innovation comes. This point was stated to me,
time after time, by the young entrepreneurs at the conference. University
courses in entrepreneurship – that is rhetoric, not ACTION.

3. Squaring the
geographic circle

There is no Africa. There is a landmass called Africa, but
there is a huge divide between the largely Islamic, northern Africa and
sub-Saharan Africa. This is causing huge problems in war zones such as South
Sudan, Somalia and northern Nigeria. The very real refugee problem is one
product of this fault line and education for refugees was discussed in detail. Many
of the people at the conference had to travel to the Middle East, Turkey or
Europe to get to Cairo, from their African countries. This is, in some ways, a
divided continent. One of the problems with the African Unions’s 2063 goals, is
that this is the age when 50 year plans are trumped by actual progress on the
ground. The 2063 African Union goals are all very well but the rhetoric of
unity does not equal ACTION.

4. Squaring online
learning

Africa cannot allow learning to be totally contained within
the box that is the traditional classroom. Like mobile banking, it has the
opportunity to think and act out of the box, turn its problems into
opportunities. This needs less attention on device-led projects such as Mitra’s
Hole in the wall, Negroponte’s tablets into Ethiopian villages or OLPC. It
needs to avoid ‘device fetish’ and build infrastructure. Online infrastructure,
connectivity, low tariffs and wider access, will create the soil within which
African innovation can grow. Grab this opportunity, to reshape education, like
Tunisia, with a mandate for a percentage of all learning to be delivered
online. Take the lead from Kenya, with its East African cloud-delivered content
service. Focus, like Zimbabwe, on exemplary teacher training with compulsory
training on the use of technology. I heard all of these policies when I was on
the panel in the closed Ministerial session. These were policies I rarely hear
outside of Africa. The politicians have some vision here – we must share these
policies and turn those policies into ACTION.

5. Squaring the NGO
circle

Another group that get a disproportionate voice at African
conferences are NGOs, again because they are well-funded and can afford the
travel. Don’t get me wrong they often do a great job but they are far from the
solution to most problems. In fact solutions are rarely optimised as they are
driven by the funding agendas of the NGOs, who often just do their own thing.
Africa needs to free itself from this dependency. Of course, this is easy to
say but difficult to do. Education, in particular, can become the plaything for
external and religious groups, Christian and Islamic. Rather than closing young
minds down, they need to be opened up to the possibilities of the future. This
will only happen when education becomes well funded from within African states.
NGO support may, in the long-term, simply exacerbate the problem.

6. Squaring tradition
with inclusivity

We ended the conference with a wonderful debate, pitching
‘tradition against ‘inclusivity’. Formally, it was two men versus two women.
Unfortunately, most of the men seemed to favour tradition, the women inclusivity.
It was an entertaining debate but beneath the surface lurked the question of
gender equality, FGM and poverty. Bizarrely some in the room claimed that
Ancient Egypt was some great example gender equality. Talk about rewriting
history! This was several thousand years of rarely uninterrupted patriarchal
rule. When the occasional woman did get a chance, like Hatshepsut, all signs of
her existence, statues and inscriptions, were meticulously destroyed. Progress
on inclusivity on gender, gay rights and other issues, still has a long way to
go. Thankfully, my good friend Maggie, from Namibia, with her Egyptian
colleague, Amany Asfour, won the debate, supporting inclusivity above
tradition.

7. Let’s square the
circle

I have been coming to e-learning Africa for some time and
have learnt one lesson from my many friends there – that in this vast
continent, there is one thing that has already squared the African circle. That
one thing is the internet. It gives
the promise of scalable solutions for the problems which exist on a massive
scale across this continent – in education, healthcare, agriculture, energy
provision, water provision, tourism and resources. From Cairo to Capetown, Lagos
to Nairobi, and beyond, one wonder binds us all – the internet.

Africa was where the first technology was invented – the
tools and technology that shaped our modern brains, technology has come full
circle and returned to envelop the whole of Africa. Mobile use is only one
example of leapfrogging. Elon Musk has just announced ‘Open AI’ – I would hope
that this sort of leapfrog thinking, from an African, can be embraced and
exploited in Africa, in the same way. There is no shortage of eager young
people, 3 in 5 are under 24, and with Africa’s population due to explode,
that’s where one has to look. Not to the tired old men in dark suits but to
Jessica, Toyose and Maggie. The World Bank estimate that a 10% increase in
broadband access results in a 1.4 % increase in GDP. Way to go.

I’ve tried to put across my impressions without either
Afro-pessimism or Afro-optimism, but with Afro-realism. Now that the circle is
truly squared, let’s get on and take some action. See you all at next year’s E-learning
Africa.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Why the tablets in schools debacle is over

After the
California debacle, schools in five states (Virginia, California, Maine,
Texas and North Carolina)are starting to swap
out tablets for the laptops they should have purchased in the first place. It
started with a survey in Maine, where teachers and students expressed a
preference for laptops over tablets.

To be
exact, 88.5% of teachers and 74% of grade 7-12 students wanted laptops, not
iPads. The observations were clear, that while iPads may be appropriate for
young children, they are not suitable for older children who need to acquire
writing and other more sophisticated skills using tools that don’t work on
iPads,

“shortcomings
for older students”

"provide
no educational function in the classroom” “students use them as toys”

“word
processing near to impossible … I applaud this change.”

“largely
students’ gaming devices”

“a
disaster”

“WE NEED
LAPTOPS!!!” a student said, three times.

Apple has caved
in and swapped the tablets for reduced price MacBook Air laptops. This reflects the fall in sales of iPads, now at their lowest since 2011. What went wrong?

(Tablets) Disaster in the taking

So tablets
have been swallowed by the hundreds of thousands in education but shown to have
serious side effects. I’ve been writing and talking about this impending
disaster since the start of 2013. My claim is that for learners beyond young children in primary schools, tablets do more damage than good.

7 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in
education

When this
madness began, in 2013, in ‘Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in education’, I argued that tablets were not the device of choice
for teachers and students, poor for writing, encouraged facile creativity, were
consumer not producer devices and awful for coding. They were vanity projects,
too expensive, as well as teacher and student unfriendly.

7 reasons why buying tablets is lousy advice

In ‘Keep on taking the tablets: 7 reasons why this is lousy advice’, I argued that the
perfect storm of aggressive vendors, naïve buyers, little or no cost
effectiveness analysis (different from cost benefits), placebo research and
groupthink, led to a tsunami of poor procurement. I’d add the cult of ‘Leadership’
in schools, that has become shorthand for a few folk making decisions without
consulting the rest, also contributed to the lemming-like rush to buy them.

7 researched ways 'tablets' can inhibit learning

At that time, I also detailed ‘7 researched ways 'tablets' can inhibit learning’. Physical and cognitive ergonomic principles were used to show that
tablets are inferior in all sorts of learning tasks, especially writing, where
they inhibit the development of complex writing but also in coding, graphics,
sustained tasks and so on.

Device fetish

Beyond this, I have argued that education suffers from ‘device fetish’, which is to
concentrate on the wrong end of the problem, using student opinion to show that
tablets were unsuitable for sustained skills development. When students reach secondary they have to learn higher order skills which tablets do not, in general, support the sort of digital literacy they need to know. To progress they neeed to have an input device that allows quick and low errorinput with haptic feedback - not a touchscreen keyboard. They also need more control over what that device does. iPads were designed to be consumer, not producer devices - they inhibit progress.

Conclusion

This is a
near perfect example of how and why technology in education so often shoots
itself in the foot. Obsessed by devices, itself a function of the refusal to do
any serious analysis on what is actually needed, schools, ‘leaders’ and vendors
opt for easy, but ill-fated, solutions - it was a gold-rush mentality. Rather than focus on good tools,
content and services, they rushed towards hardware. Why? I suspect it’s less
challenging, doesn’t threaten ‘teaching’ and is seen as an adjunct, rather than
core, pedagogic approach. Here's the solution - do the research, listen to what learners actually want. Stop this amateurish, device madness. Note that I'm happy with their use in primary school and also with tablets that have full keyboards (those are really laptops) but even here one has to be careful on costs.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

20 unorthodox public speaking (DO & DON'T) tips

I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years, all
around the world. Not saying I know all the answers, but if you are petrified
about public speaking or want some tips, here’s a few that you don’t often see
in the textbooks. I’ve aimed it at education and training.

The worst talk I ever saw was by an academic, who, in a monotone voice, read a prepared paper from a lectern, that was nothing but stats about her university, for an hour, to the minute. At the end, she was thanked by the Chair, as Professor of Communication at Moscow University. I was literally in stitches. Why would anyone read a paper from a lectern - this makes no sense - email it to me but don't make me sit through this nonsense.
Last word, say what you really think, not what you think they want to hear. And don't play to the happy sheet thing. You're not a clown and the point is not to make them 'happy'. If anything make them uncomfortable. Take people out of their comfort zone,the groupthing that is so common in the learning game. Thanks for listening....

Monday, May 16, 2016

I sat through a one hour talk (lecture) on plagiarism this
week, where the speaker (University plagiarism rep) showed not a single
citation but plenty of anecdotal bullet points. There was even a bit of
plagiarism from another plagiarism expert. As the old adage goes, when students
copy, it is plagiarism; academics call it research.

What threw me was the complete absence of any critical
thought around the nature of the problem. This is a cat and mouse game, where
predictable, often identical assignments (largely long-form essays) are set,
students procrastinate, share, cut and paste and increasingly purchase essays,
only to wait sometimes weeks for often sparse feedback and a solitary grade.

There just doesn’t seem to be any will to solve the problem,
only sticking plaster solutions, namely grammarly.com (free), academicpalgiarism.com (cheap) or turnitin.com(expensive)
or SafeAssign.com (BlackBoard). Turnitin also has writecheck,
a service that allows students to submit their work. Actually turnitin.com is
not that expensive per student and pays for itself in being a massive deterrent,
as well as taking the pressure off teachers.

The game

But the game is getting more complex as, on one side,
institutions and academics are bogged down in traditional trench warfare
lobbing out the same old, big essay assignments, against guerrilla fighters using good comms,
high tech and stealth. Actually, in truth, it’s more like wrestling, a sort of
pre-planned charade where both sides play out a predictable set of routines. As
long as institutions see this as a deficit problem (those pesky students and
essay companies ruining our trade) nothing will change. This is a problem that
needs smart solutions, not denial and mouse-traps.

In the red corner

On one side, institutions and academics set predictable
assignments. The format is the lazy essay question. They often don’t change for
years. In this case the speaker, who taught English, had been using identical
assignments for seven years! Why does this happen? First, fossilised practice,
second teaching comes second to research, third a dearth of assessment design
skills, fourth the institution encourages this fossilised and primitive form of
assessment, fifth, the quality bodies are stuck in a model that has barely
changed in a hundred years.

In the blue corner

On the other side, students use tech that makes it easier
for them to play the game and win. They’re on social media, making it easier to
share. They have access to oodles of sources from which they can cut and paste.
Beyond this they can buy relatively cheap, and undetectable, essays and
dissertations, online. To be fair, they often don’t receive enough teaching and
advice on how to do assignments with academic integrity. The psychology here is
interesting. The assignment turns into a chore. They know that feedback will be
light and that it is unpredictable when they will get the marked essay back.
They start to see learning as a game.

Institutionalised
behaviour

Increasing
numbers of students, with English as a second language, clearly results in more
pressure to cheat. Their parents have paid through the nose and failure is hard
to take as it involves huge loss of face. The practice of getting their essays
translated from their first language is also commonplace, which makes
plagiarism even harder to detect. Even with native English speakers, the
pressures of student loans and high expectations from parents may push them to
take this route. On top of this is the reluctance of academics to do the
necessary detection work, which can be detailed and arduous, to follow up on cheating.
You need a lot of very sure evidence to pull this off and most don’t even want
to start the process and climb that bureaucratic mountain. Another protective
layer on top of this, is the reluctance of the institution to admit it happens,
as there’s reputation loss. This is a perfect storm, where students, teachers
and institutions, literally institutionalize cheating.

The problem

If you repeatedly ask and don’t receive, you’re probably
asking wrongly. I had a conversation with Professor at a top UK London
University who was horrified when she was forced by the University to set essay
questions for her pharmacology students. She thought it was a dumb-ass form of
assessment for her subject and she was right. Essays are sometimes appropriate
assignments if one wants long-form critical thought. But in many subjects
shorter, more targeted assignments and testing are far better. There’s a lot of
formative assessment techniques out there and essays are just one of them. Short
answer questions, open-response, formative testing, adaptive testing. I’d argue
that student blogs are often better than essays as one can see progress and
it’s not something that’s easy to plagiarise. Truth be told, HE wants it easy,
and essays are easy to set. They also have to accept that they are also easy to
cheat.

One other problem in HE is the ready confusion between
formative and summative assessment. There’s far too much marking and summative
assessment in HE. If the assignment is a formative learning experience, why
mark at all? It’s all about the feedback. Professor Black, who has spent
decades studying this issue, recommends NOT marking to focus on feedback.
Marking acts as an end point. High performing students get 80% then stop,
assuming the other 20% is not worth the effort, low performing students get
demotivated, What learners actually need is not a mark but detailed and
constructive feedback.

There’s also the problem of what counts as plagiarism. One
of the problems is that plagiarism sites often count direct quotes as
plagiarism, confusing the stats and sending false positives into the system. A
second problem is what constitutes ‘common knowledge’ i.e. stuff that doesn’t
have to have citations. This is tricky.

But there’s an even worse problem in assessment. To rely on
the essay format or long-form prose answers is to encourage students to
memorise essays and play roulette with the subject in their finals. Students,
the world over, play the game of final assessment by memorising essays. There's a pretence that it's testing critical thought. It's not.

Undetectable cheating

We know the scale of the problem. Compare the scanty number
of cases actually reported by institutions against the number and size of the
companies offering such services. There’s a massive gap and this is just the
tip of the iceberg, as most of it is in the grey economy, with even parents doing the cheating. Purchased essays and dissertations are now commonplace in
Universities. But much of this is their own fault. They’re stagnant in their
form of teaching and assessment, with the one hour lecture still the dominant,
global pedagogy, and essays the commonest form of assessment. These are often
written by disgruntled PhDs who can’t get jobs. This guy’s testimony is
typical. You could legislate against
such companies but it would just shift abroad. This is a huge industry. What we
should do is add up the turnover of all of these companies then triple it, as
most of it is black market.

A freshly written essay, costs about as much as an expensive
meal for two. Remember, that as a return on investment, even a grand or two is
well worth it, for that bit of paper with your University name on it and those
numbers after the degree. That, as they keep telling us, is worth lots of
muoolah.

What to do?

In truth, there are lots of alternatives to the long-form
essay. Here’s ten for starters.

2. If
essays are required, think about notes, first drafts and so on. This is a far
more useful form of learning and teaching. Why be so summative and final with a
once-only submission process. Writing is not like that – it’s an iterative process.

3. Audio
and video submission. I’ve seen this work well. It’s difficult to bullshit on a
video or audio recording.

4. Presentations
with questions. Make students present and put them under scrutiny through
questioning. This is a far more sophisticated form of formative assessment.

5. More regular short form assessments during and at end of lectures.
Read Eric Mazur on how to do this. He’s the master.

6. Peer assessment. Get students to critique and give feedback on each
other’s work. It’s a good learning experience for both sides.

7. Quick
fire quizzes have been shown to be extremely productive in terms of retention
and recall in learning. Do this often. Why not at the end or during all lectures?

8. Don’t
set predictable assignments, that have been set dozens of times before as banks
of essays will have been already written. Set unusual assignments that are more
closely aligned with your course, refer to lessons, lectures, class discussions
and are not too generic. This makes it difficult for the external essay
writers.

9. Set
little Trojan Horses on the go – from Journals that the essay companies don’t have
access to, or items from your own writing.

10. Check
by Googling your assignment. You may find them being touted around.

Conclusion

This has reached crisis point. Everyone knows it but there’s
a conspiracy of silence. Universities are scared to admit the scale of the
problem, as they trade on reputation. We’ve created this monster but
institutional inertia is incapable of solving the problem, as they refuses to
change. And it’s not only coursework that’s a problem. Want to get into a good
university from China, there’s lots of places you can get ‘advice’ and ‘help’
from. Speak to students who get to know their colleagues and they’ll be quick
to tell you anecdotes about students who can barely speak English getting into
Universities and still scoring well in essays. It’s endemic before the students
even arrive. A more interesting problem, one barely recognised, is that many
students from more privileged backgrounds, have parents who do this work for
them. I’ve heard parents brazenly tell me about the essays they’ve written for
their sprogs. This, I suspect, is an even bigger problem and one that
discriminates against students who don’t have that support at home. It’s time
for change folks. Will it happen? Will it hell.